Tuesday’s Boston Globe featured an odd little editorial with the odder headline:

Olbermann: Requiem for a Foxy liberal

The Globe editors contend that fighting fire with fire is too, well, inflammatory:

It was Olbermann whose increasingly partisan rants helped transform MSNBC from a neutral news channel to a left-wing counterpart to the Fox News Channel. The move was good for MSNBC’s ratings, but not for political dialogue; suddenly, the angry extremes of talk were no longer restricted to Fox.

They say that like it’s a bad thing.

Preferable to Olbermann’s hammer-and-tongue approach, the Globeniks say, is this:

A group like Media Matters for America, which meticulously documents and fact-checks the content of Fox News, is a better antidote to any nutty Glenn Beck tirade than an equal-and-opposite reaction a few channels down.

I dunno: Is there really all that much daylight between born-again liberal David Brock, who runs Media Matters, and boring-again Keith Olbermann?

6 Responses to Boston Globe To Keith Olbermann: Good Riddance!

I checked my calendar and noticed that today’s name has vowels in it, so the CO must be running an anti-Keith rant…and here it is. Ok, I read the editorial with a hint of false-equivalency between MSNBC and the Faux Right-Wing Propaganda network; but what really frosted my nose was the comment about “a few channels down”! About two years ago, I was receiving Comcast cable by running the wire into my house straight to the TV; NO CABLE BOX INVOLVED. Comcast then sent me a notice that if I wanted to continue receiving certain channels I’d have to get a so-called digital starter box for a host of outlets including C-Span II & III, History International (where all the Hitler docs go to die), and MSNBC…the last of which was moved from the midst of the news and fake news channels (FRWPN 41,CNN 42,CNN’s Headline News as it was then called 43 and C-Span the mother ship 44) way up to channel 251. From time to time, I’d receive mailers from Verizon that placed an asterisk next to MSNBC stating that it may not be available in all areas, and Dish TV, which did not include MSNBC in its cheapest package, but DID offer FRWPN, CNN and HLN. Now the newly yclept Xfinity is offering a bargain-basement package that does not now offer MSNBC (that will probably change now that Xfinity’s holding company owns the NBCU stable of channels) so that for the time being people who want to continue receving MSNBC channel 251 must pay more. See a pattern here? Ah, but there may be good news: on Tuesday, 01/25, the Stephanie Miller show on WWZN-AM 1510 reported that Keith’s non-compete on TV may be less than six months, and he could return by spring! Parker/Spitzer look out.

Olbermann actually regularly used Media Matters for America stories as his source material for segments on the show, though usually without crediting his source. I think it would be rather straight-forward to document this news pathway.

But I think it would be accurate to say that Olbermann took Media Matters stories/topics up at least one or two notches (if not more) in the rhetoric. There’s certainly some daylight between them.

Is it possible the editors relegated this to an intern? Because it’s tough for us old folks to forget how the growing proud-right Regressive Party had near complete command of the mess media (especially radio) before Olbermann showed up. He jump-started a salvation from the Regressives AND from the delusion of ‘neutral news.’ Paging Murrow. And Olbermann.